Examiner Editorial: Health care reform must include leashing trial lawyers

President Barack Obama has often stated his belief that “health care reform should be guided by a simple principle. Fix what is broken and build on what works.” Those are fine-sounding words, but the president muffed a recent opportunity to back them up with concrete action. The occasion was the chief executive’s address to the recent annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Chicago.

In a speech billed by White House aides as an attempt to reach out to a major group that has been critical of his health care reform plans, Obama called the high cost of health care “a ticking time bomb” for the U.S. economy. He cited “unnecessary tests and procedures as part of a ‘defensive’ medicine culture created in part by the risk of medical malpractice suits.” And he declared his willingness to “explore a range of ideas” on what to do about rising health care costs. But then he made it crystal clear that his range of acceptable ideas doesn’t extend to medical malpractice reform.

Obama’s contradictory pronouncements are puzzling considering the magnitude of savings that would result simply from approving reasonable caps on medical malpractice awards.

Medical malpractice costs approach $30 billion annually, according to studies by Tillinghast-Towers & Perrin, but other experts put the total closer to $100 billion when “defensive medicine” expenses are included. Costs have increased at nearly 12 percent per year since 1975, a period of time that coincides with an explosion of malpractice and other class action lawsuits in state and federal courts.

Simply enacting a cap of $250,000 on medical malpractice awards for noneconomic pain-and-suffering losses would go a long way toward capturing the $300 billion in savings Obama implored the doctors to help him find. Yet, he stoutly rejected caps, saying they are “unfair to people who have been wrongfully harmed.”

The key to understanding the president’s rejection, of course, lies in the fact that especially prominent among his party’s biggest contributors are the trial lawyers who make millions in fees from malpractice suits regardless whether they win or lose with the judge or jury.

Until reasonable limits are put in place to negate the incentive of unlimited jury awards that encourage trial lawyers to file multiple lawsuits — literally thousands in class-action cases — the costs of treatment will continue to spiral, more doctors and other highly trained medical specialists will leave to pursue other professions, and the quality of health care will suffer for everybody. The president’s pertinacious attitude on caps is mystifying.